TAKE A DEEP BREATH

I need to admit several things tonight.

No. 1 - Talking for more than an hour on the phone with my sibling makes my face break out.

I will happily chat with my oldest daughter for days on end, and we never seem to run of things to talk/gossip/complain/praise.

And I don't seem to have any acne developments from this.

But about once a month, I call my brother, and normally leave a message on his answering machine, and he calls me back later when he can.

And we don't have a conversation - we have an exchange of obscure musical trivia facts.

I openly confess that I am incredibly jealous of my brother's brain. He has what is commonly referred to as a photographic memory, and besides the retention of an impossible amount of facts, is a talented and able musician.

Unfortunately, my brother's brain is almost missing a few things. Such as the regular give-and-talk of a tête-à-tête - letting the other person get a word in edgewise.

So somehow an hour on the phone becomes, literally, an hour with the phone stuck on my face as I resign myself to occasionally "uh hu,"s and "yeah, right"s, while I attempt to take care of the dogs, fill the horses' water, finish the dishes and eat my own dinner.

And then I notice that I am developing a sixteen-year-old-worthy zit on my left cheek.


No. 2 - I cannot walk and talk.

For years, I have excused my noticeable lack-of-grace with the glib idiom "I can't chew bubble gum and walk to the same time."

A common method of determining if you are running a good pace is to make certain you can talk while you are running.

I have never been able to do that. I have trouble talking while I am walking.

My lungs have extremely diminished capacity (I love 'diminished' - the word shrinks as you pronounce it) small due to a collapsed sternum , or what is called pectus excavatum - also referred to as a 'monkey chest' in children.

Regardless, I used to run four miles at a time… just really, really slowly.

Today, as I was huffing and puffing on a fairly short walk over to the mud football field to move the water hose for the 474th time this week (but boy, am I getting a impressive crop of mud), I finally accepted something.

I need to breath in with one step, breath out with the next. Without speaking. To just be able to walk and keep my breath.


No. 3 - I have been keeping up with daily exercise, smaller portions, healthier food for over two weeks… and I have GAINED four pounds.

MY OTHER SISTER'S KEEPER

My oldest sister and I have never had a 'sisterly' relationship for one pure and simple reason; she is 22 years older than I am, and was married and had a child before I was even born.

So it's been much more like having an aunt instead of a sister - or maybe like having a part-time second mom.

I do remember spending a lot of summer vacations with my sister's family. This may have been due to my parents marital instability, or maybe just to have me around kids my age (i.e. my nieces and my nephew).

And every single one of those summers was at some lake. Because the entire family was water-ski crazy.

No, crazy is too gentle a word. They were INSANE about water-skiing. Water-skiing for competition, water-skiing barefoot (that means without skis - and really, people do that), water-skiing with more than a couple of beers…

No, wait, that's another topic for another time.

My sister even set a record for women's skiing with something to do with Catalina Island - fastest around or distance, something like that.

But guess what? I never ever learned to water-ski, even with everyone teaching me and trying to get me skiing, each and every summer.

Well, not fully.

The 'getting-up' part is supposed to be the tough part, and I could do that just great. For me, it was the 'staying-up-one-the-skis-and-not-eating-lake-water" part that was impossible.

My fondest memories of vacation-time-at-my-sister's was one time when one of my nieces or my nephew and I did something out-of-line (something they did very rarely and I did continually).

My brother-in-law, who was then and is now retired from being a Los Angeles firefighter (read that BIG and TOUGH), stepped right in and was ready to immediately, how shall I put it, administer physical repercussion.

I, at the age of three or four, stood my ground and told him, "You can't do that."

"Why not?" with an expression on his face which would have undoubtedlly stopped a normal child who wished to live to disobey another day.

"Because I am your sister-in-law."

I think he is still a little bit scared of me to this day.